In some ways, I tell and explain jokes for a living.   Part of what I love about teaching American literature is sharing its humor with students, some of whom have been schooled to see “LitTRAture” as a serious thing with a capital “L”.   They sometimes feel distant from it, and defensive.

But “getting” humor, as I said in my previous blog entry, involves a shared ground, a common experience.  Trying to directly explain what’s funny about a joke often makes the listener feel even more an outsider, a butt of the joke rather than one who shares in it.  On the other hand, describing the context that makes a joke funny puts you both on common ground.   Further, American humor is often self-deprecating, or based in a feeling of being an outsider or in a perception of being lesser than someone else, somehow less worthy.   Not getting the joke at first can even increase our identification with and enjoyment of it once we have possession of the context that makes it funny.  We share the pain, as it were.

Literary humor works on many levels, depending on the context you consider; the more contexts you consider, the funnier it gets.  Mark Twain, in Chapter XXV of A Tramp Abroad, relates an anecdote in which a young woman seems to get the better of the narrator, taking advantage of his obtuseness; she finally explains the joke, ostensibly to let him in on it, but really to punish him for not remembering her.  The scene is funny enough on its surface level, playing on pretense and the embarrassment most of us have felt when someone we cannot place seems to remember us.  But it is the context that makes the scene hilarious, as Mark Twain claims the last laugh.  And not coincidentally, it is also this humorous context that gives the scene its depth and significance.  We laugh about the things that really matter, often about things that hurt.

The narrator and his companion Harris get into an argument about some folks at another table–whether they’re American and if so, from which state, and then about the age of the—not coincidentally—pretty girl.  As the “dispute . . . waxed warm,” the narrator declares to Harris “with a pretense of being in earnest” (247) that he’ll simply go ask.  Harris dares him to, saying that he’d never have the balls to do such a thing.  Caught, the narrator approaches the table, planning an innocuous opening that will get him out of the awkward situation quickly.

To his surprise, the girl speaks up first, as though she knows him.  When he fails to recognize her but pretends that he does, the girl takes him along a garden path of fabricated reminiscences, one of which refers to someone called “Darley”: Continue reading →